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The department of sociology at Georgetown College has a rich tradition of scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and community engagement. The department has a history of important contributions to social inquiry and service to college and surrounding communities.

Combining our department’s small size with intellectual diversity, commitment to community engagement and service learning, a generous student-faculty ratio, and strong tradition of commitment to students, our current department seeks to provide students with the skills and values needed to understand complex social systems and to participate in empowerment and reform that can create a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.

Sociology is the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior and was developed out of the desire to apply the analytic rigor of science to the social concerns of the world. Thus, our department stresses the marriage of critical thinking, human empathy, and the highest standards of empirical inquiry. Our students receive instruction in both classical and contemporary social theory, from Marx, Weber, and Durkheim to DuBois, Schutz, and Habermas and cutting-edge quantitative, qualitative, and community-based research methods. Most importantly, students also learn how to apply theoretical and empirical analysis to current social issues from poverty in Appalachia to conspicuous consumption, or from anomic and deviant professional athletes to the prison industrial complex. Students learn how sociology yields robust insights into the social forces shaping individuals and problems in contemporary society. The ability to recognize and understand these forces—an ability which C.W. Mills called the “sociological imagination”—is indispensable preparation for personal and professional participation in a changing and increasingly complex world.

Diverse in interests, theories, and methodologies, our faculty and students at Georgetown are unified in their passion for intellectual commitment, belief in the importance of the exchange of knowledge and partnership with the community, and in their desire to continually re-imagine sociology as a valuable framework for social inquiry.

It should come as no surprise that our students find themselves well prepared for a wide variety of career options and graduate and professional studies.

Developing advocates for change, committed to scholarship, social justice, and empowerment.